Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the option that best fits each of the numbered blanks.

The World's First GPS

On a stormy night in 1707, four ships struck rocks off the south coast of England and sank. One thousand, four hundred sailors were drowned. The ships had crashed because they had no way of knowing how far they had travelled in a particular direction; they could not calculate their longitude, which required accurate time meas urement. (18) ________. In such difficult circumstances, they believed that the best response to the disaster was a competition: the Longitude Prize.

The Longitude Prize was no ordinary competition. (19) ________. Geniuses such as Sir Isaac Newton had failed to find a solution, so to ensure the interest of Britain's greatest scientific minds, the government offered a prize of £20,000 - the equivalent of £2.6 million in today's money. But to everyone's surprise, it wasn't a famous academic who solved the problem, but an unknown carpenter. When John Harrison wasn't working with wood, (20) ________. An accurate clock would allow sailors to calculate their position, but at the time it was thought impossible to create a mechanical clock (21) ________. The movement of the sea and the changes in temperature destroyed the delicate parts. However, after three frustrated attempts, Harrison's fourth sea clock, H4, finally triumphed. Its mechanics were so good that the H14 worked better than most clocks on land.

The Longitude Prize and Harrison's success (22) ________. However, in 2013, the British government created a new Longitude Prize, offering £10 million to the person who could solve a great challenge to humanity.

[Adapted from Friends Global]